Nala.

The studio lamp was rescued from a dumpster at Arts on Main, the neighborhood art market. The worktable she bought from a dentist who was closing down. The waiting chair — where clients sit before Nala calls them over — came from a Jeppestown barbershop that sold off its furniture at the end of the month.

Nothing in that studio was designed to be there. Everything was found. Nala rented the space — a former tailor's workshop, the parallel with her grandmother Koko isn't lost on her, though she doesn't say it out loud — and filled it with whatever turned up. She didn't renovate anything. She adapted what was already there. The aardwolf doesn't dig burrows: it moves into ones others left behind. Nala does the same with spaces and objects. The dumpster lamp works better than any catalog lamp because it has the exact angle her drawing table needs, and she didn't plan that — she discovered it after putting it in place.

There's something in that way of putting a space together — without a project, without a budget, with whatever comes — that resembles how she builds a tattoo. Dot by dot. No continuous stroke. Each decision on its own, and the pattern only emerges when you've put down enough dots.

The studio is in a converted industrial building. Maboneng means "place of light" in Sesotho. Nala opens at three in the afternoon and closes between one and two in the morning. She works at night, like the animal she carries on her. By day she sleeps. At night, the hands are steadier and the neighborhood is quieter. Summer electrical storms on the Highveld are the only thing that interrupts sessions — not out of fear, but because load shedding cuts the power and you have to wait.

The third floor has a window facing east. In the morning a light comes in that Nala never sees because she's sleeping. But when she gets up at two in the afternoon and the light is already coming in from the side, the studio has that color temperature that makes everything look older and more real than it is. The dumpster lamp, the dentist's table, the barbershop chair, the fourteen pattern sketchbooks on the shelf. And on the wall, a hand-drawn map of the routes she walks in the small hours after closing: Fox Street, Jeppestown, Bez Valley if the night is clear, back via Main Street. No headphones. Listening to the city the way she used to listen to the Limpopo countryside as a girl.

If you hang this poster on your wall, what you see is the portrait: studded jacket, pink hoodie, spike collar, the direct gaze of someone who looks harder than they are. The aardwolf raises the crest along its back to appear forty percent larger than it is. It doesn't have the bite to back it up. Just the display. Nala is five foot four and with the jacket on projects something that people mistake for hardness until she hands you a cold glass of water before you've asked for one. The [full biography](https://www.yagopartal.com/animal-kinhood/nala/) tells how she got from Limpopo to Maboneng, what happened with Koko, and why she's worn the collar for six years.